Explorers of the invert expanse are told to take some little piece of the world with them when they enter. A bit of the outside trailing into the inside so that, the explorer, lost on the fringes of herself, may find a way home. For my mother, she chose the scent of chopped ginger.

We fled from one apocalypse to another. Earthquakes and choking ash luckily do not forestall sleep. Hooked up to the electrodes, we're sure we can find some calmer, deeper abode, settle down with provisions, make a camp, and think our way out of this mess. We arm ourselves with aromas, textures, scents, temperatures, satieties and the like, and rove out into the electric sea. The light from our eyes beat down on us, twin dot-matrix suns speckled with nervous noise. When the mind is all you have left, everything feels like a fire.

Hope is the thing that tells us the mind is eternally complex which means it contains the dot product of all possible ideas. Without the right idea, we would not have been born, because we live in the best of all possible worlds where we always have all the answers. We toil to decompose an answer in the noise, because the alternative, we suppose, is conceptual suicide. A universe in which we don't is not one worth living in anyway. Deep inside yourself, you can go on forever.

The ferrymen of the heart recommend to travel light and move when it's dark. When the storms hit, we take out our little memories and pass them around. Say the prayers we remember, for we're only as real as we think we are. Mouth the word-signs, count the syllables: green chilli, steamed rice, chopped ginger, vinegar dip, fresh parsley, a single dried fish dangling from a clothesline in the breeze. Mother, I've seen how you look at the suns with thirst.

On an island of stability, we stop to dredge ideas, cast nets, find nothing. Move deeper on what may be tomorrow, towards a new field.